Meet Me on the Beach

by Hilary Boyd

  Karen helped with the washing-up—not as bad as it might have been because of the paper plates and plastic cutlery and glasses—then sat amongst the men and listened to their stories. They were of all ages: some obviously had mental health or substance abuse problems, their twitchy anxiety and inability to relate painful to watch; some seemed bewildered as to how they had got themselves into this state; others were almost comfortable with who they were. But there was a good deal of humor and very little whining about their lot.

  She had long since given up on William Haskell when he finally walked through the door of the church annex. And for a second she wondered if it was really him. He had lost weight, his dark hair was longer and wild from the wind outside, and he was dressed in jeans, heavy black work boots and a gray cable jumper. He looked younger. It was as if he had literally stripped off his old life to reveal a different human being beneath.

  He didn’t notice her at first as he greeted some of the men at the tables—they clearly knew him and were pleased to see him. Fisher got up, his face tight with concern, and began to make his way across the room. But before he had reached his friend, William’s gaze, scanning the hall, lighted on Karen.

  She held her breath.

  He looked stunned, did a double take, a small frown appearing as he bit his lip, turned to listen to what Fisher was telling him. Karen couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t hear anything anymore, in fact. The hum of chat, the scraping of chairs, the laughter, the wind rattling the flimsy roof covering had faded to zero. It was just her and William in this cocoon of silence. The room could have been empty for all she was aware. Then he was making his way toward her.

  She got up slowly. “Hi, William.”

  He took a deep breath. “Karen . . .”

  William’s expression was unreadable, but the softness in his eyes as he looked at her was enough.

  “I suppose you thought you’d escaped me,” she said, smiling up at him.

  He smiled too now. “I suppose I did,” he said, but was prevented from saying any more as Sue came up to give him a hug and wish him Happy Christmas.

  *

  They were shutting the hall at seven and the men slowly shuffled out into the night. The storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Small groups still lingered outside the hall, smoking and chatting, reluctant to move on. The kitchen was back to its pristine state, pots and pans stacked on the shelves, the meager remains of the meal packed into foil parcels and handed out to the men for later.

  Karen didn’t know what to do. There had been no chance to speak to William as various people claimed him in the hour before the hall closed. She wasn’t even sure if William would want to talk to her. Perhaps he would just go off into the night, disappear again—guarded by his friend, Alistair, of course—and refuse to communicate with her.

  But as she said goodbye to the two women, got into her coat, extracted Largo from the clutches of a burly, bearded man with a Polish accent who had become the dog’s new best friend, William was suddenly at her side.

  “Are you going home now?” he asked.

  Karen looked at him. “I was, but I’m pretty tired. I might stay here tonight, go back in the morning.”

  She saw him hesitate. “Well, if . . . if you have time and want to talk . . .”

  “Of course I want to talk,” she said softly.

  “Alistair . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk with him there,” she said.

  Will nodded. “No, I understand . . . but there isn’t really anywhere to go on Christmas Day except a noisy pub.”

  “It’s stopped raining. We could just walk down to the beach.”

  His face cleared. “The beach, good idea. There’s bound to be at least one café open along the front.”

  Alistair came up, eyebrows raised as he looked from one to the other. “Is there a plan?”

  “We’re going for a walk,” William said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Fisher nodded and smiled at Karen, held his hand out as he said goodbye. “I hope I’m forgiven,” he said.

  “Almost,” she said.

  *

  The promenade was dim, except for the swaying strings of colored Christmas lights hanging between the lamp posts, with the arcade and most of the cafés closed up. There were few people about on such a rough night, most of them probably comatose in front of The Sound of Music. The wind was still buffeting the shore, the black sea roiling over the beach in high, foamy lines.

  For a while they stood in silence together, watching. They hadn’t said a word on their walk down to the seafront. The café they found was badly lit and empty except for a group of five teenagers—two boys and three girls—at the back, cans of Coke and Fanta and two white polystyrene containers of chips open on the table. The girl behind the counter, earphones in, cheap Santa hat pulled down over her pasty face, took their order for tea. They sat in the steamed-up window. Karen would almost have preferred the silence to continue. She decided to let him speak first.

  “It’s good to see you,” was all he said, only glancing briefly up at her.

  She nodded and silence fell again, only interrupted by the girl bringing two white mugs of tea and setting them down on the pale laminated table.

  “I suppose you want some answers,” he said when she had gone.

  She nodded, waited.

  “Where to start . . .” He took a deep breath, looking down at his mug as he began to talk in a hesitant voice. “I suppose it was like the perfect storm. You, Rachel leaving home, the possibility of being promoted, Janey finding out. I haven’t been happy for a long time now, as I’m sure you realized.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Not just my marriage, but my work too. I’m not cut out to be a vicar, Karen—” He stopped again. “I passionately believe in God—I hope that will never change—but I can’t be the one to persuade other people to stick to the Anglican doctrine.”

  “I didn’t know you were unhappy in your marriage.”

  William shrugged. “No . . . well, we tried our best to make it work. Janey’s a good person, but she wasn’t cut out to be a vicar’s wife any more than I was to be a vicar. She hated it from the start, never understood why I’d made the change from a good career in advertising. And I admit, it is quite a burden on a wife—she has to be part of the whole Church package, like it or not.” He paused. “In the light of what’s happened, maybe she knew me better than I knew myself.”

  “She put up a good show of liking it.”

  “Yeah, in public. But at home she was miserable. Rachel was just about the only thing that kept us together.”

  “When she confronted me about you, she seemed so keen on the bishop thing. As if she really wanted you to be one. Said I’d ruin your life if I messed that up.”

  “I think she thought that any change would be better than staying a vicar’s wife. At least bishops have status, bishops’ wives don’t have to do all the community stuff. But even the thought of being a bishop helped to focus my mind, made me realize what I didn’t want.”

  There was silence between them as they both contemplated the ruins of William’s marriage and career.

  “She told Sheila you hadn’t warned her you were leaving till the morning you did. Then you just walked out. She said she didn’t even know where you were going. Everyone in the village thinks you’re a monster for doing that.”

  William’s face tightened. “It wasn’t like that. Things . . . I didn’t deal with it well . . . but we both knew the writing was on the wall as far as our marriage was concerned.” He looked down. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Karen was puzzled. “Why was Janey so upset about me, then? She was acting like someone who wanted to save her marriage, not someone who had accepted it was all over. She did everything in her power to put me off, including saying you were serially unfaithful.”

  “That was before—” He stopped. “Before things got really bad.”

  Karen frowned. She believed what he was saying,
but he seemed to be holding something back.

  “But I assure you there were never any other women before you. A couple of women maybe were keener on me, as their vicar, than they should have been. But there was nothing more to it, I promise.”

  William leaned back in his chair, his hands around his mug of tea, which he had hardly touched.

  “And that’s the thing, Karen. What we had . . . I’m not sure it was real.”

  She felt her stomach tighten. “Wasn’t real?”

  “I wasn’t me . . . I was playing the vicar. Well, not playing it exactly. I meant it, or at least tried to mean it, but I was struggling every second of every day. I told you before, that day on the hill, but you didn’t believe me, that you were in love with the person you thought I was. A man of integrity, a good man, a man of God . . .” He paused. “I’m not that person.”

  “You think I’m so shallow I’d fall for just an image?”

  “Not an ‘image,’ but a package. You fell in love with a vicar, Karen.”

  “Stop saying that. I get it. But I didn’t, you’re wrong. I fell in love with you, William. I didn’t give a toss if you were a vicar or a beach bum. It was you I loved.”

  She spoke about her love in the past tense, she realized. And she asked herself now if there was any truth in what William was saying. She had met him at a vulnerable time in her life, he had saved her from guilt and despair. Was it, in fact, the counselor, the priest whom she had loved?

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Karen’s mind was boiling up like the sea outside, the whole fabric of her dreams suddenly threatened.

  “So you’re saying you were never in love with me.” She didn’t make it a question.

  There was a long moment of silence, stretching out her words until they reached breaking point.

  “I was always in love with you,” he said, finally, his voice hardly above a whisper. The depth of his sincerity brought tears to her eyes. “From the first minute I set eyes on you.”

  “Will . . .”

  He shook his head vigorously. “But that isn’t the point. I lied to you, I led you up the garden path. The fact is, you have no idea who I am, Karen, who William Haskell is. You can’t, because I myself have no idea who I am right now either.”

  She could see the tears in his eyes too.

  “And anyway, all that’s in the past,” he went on. “Things have changed so much.”

  “So you’re saying that although you loved me, you don’t love me anymore, now that you’re someone else?” She almost wanted to laugh, what he was saying was so tortuous, so ridiculous.

  Her heart had contracted to the smallest, hardest stone when he insisted their love was a mirage, but then, seconds later, had soared like a bird escaping a cage as he admitted the exact opposite. And it was his confession of love that she heard, the rest just flimflam, stupid, so much white noise.

  “I’m not talking about my feelings, I’m talking about yours,” he said.

  “That isn’t for you to decide.”

  He sighed, as if the discussion were too much for him. As it was becoming for her too. Did he have to make it so complicated?

  “Listen, all I’m saying is that my life is chaos. Everything that I had has gone. I have no career, no home, no family, no money, no . . .” He let out a long sigh. “I literally don’t know which way is up at the moment. If it weren’t for Alistair . . .”

  Silence.

  “You remember that night at the beach, don’t you?” she said.

  He nodded. “Of course I do.”

  “That was as real to me as anything I’ve experienced in my whole life.”

  Another silence.

  “But it was a different time. It’s not now, Karen,” he said.

  His lack of acknowledgment about their time together made Karen begin to doubt whether it had meant anything to him or not. Nor did she understand what he was getting at, this stubborn insistence that he was another person. It didn’t make sense.

  “So this new life of yours . . . it obviously doesn’t include me.”

  It seemed like an age before he replied, “It’s not that simple.”

  And there was something in the way he spoke that stopped her from asking William what he meant.

  “I’d better go . . . I have to find somewhere to stay.” She got up, her heart thumping furiously. “I feel as if we’ve been here before. I say I love you and you say I don’t. I could have saved us both the trouble of repeating ourselves.”

  William got up too, put his hands on her arms. “Karen, please. Don’t be angry with me. I have nothing to offer you . . . really, nothing, you have to believe me.”

  “You could have just told me so, months ago. You could have sent a ‘Dear John’ text telling me it was over. It would have been the decent thing to do.”

  He looked into her eyes as they stood there, and she could see a desperate pain.

  “I should have done that,” he said quietly as she wrenched herself free and slammed her way out of the café, running along the front like a demented woman, her heart bleeding and in tatters as if she had been stabbed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Karen sat in the car outside the church for a long time. She wasn’t crying, barely even thinking, but she didn’t have the strength to drive anywhere. She knew she ought to get on and find somewhere to stay, but pulling out her mobile to look online she couldn’t get a signal. After sitting there for a while longer, Largo snoring peacefully on the back seat, she started the engine and drove back down to the seafront, knowing there would be a plethora of hotels there.

  The first one she picked, a discreet building in the middle of a Georgian terrace, had rooms, but said they were very sorry but they could not, under the terms of their insurance, accommodate the dog. They sent her off to another, further down Grand Parade at White Rock. It was modern, clean and dog-friendly, a raucous din emanating from the dining room where a Christmas party was obviously in full swing. Karen didn’t mind, she just wanted somewhere to lay her head for a few hours until she felt strong enough for the drive home. Shivering from the time in the chilly car, she had a hot shower and then watched television for a while, knowing she would not sleep yet, if at all.

  Her thoughts of William were so jumbled, so incoherent, that she couldn’t focus and she was too tired to make sense of the millions of fragmented, unanswered questions that seeing him had raised. Was it true that his life was such a mess that he had no space for her? Or was that just an excuse for the fact that he had never really loved her, just used her to medicate himself at a time when everything else was going wrong? Was his addiction to doing the “far, far better thing” getting in the way of him making a rational decision? She’d definitely seen the light in his eyes when he said he had loved her—that wasn’t her imagination. But he was different now, that also was true. If she were assessing Will clearly, she’d say he seemed happier, more himself than he had in his vicar incarnation. He did not appear dragged down by chaos and uncertainty as he kept insisting. Yet . . . there was something darker there, something he wasn’t telling her.

  And Alistair Fisher.

  William was obviously staying with him, because he’d said, “I’ll see you later.” The ex-priest had behaved, now she thought about it, like someone who was not only extremely fond of William, but possessive too. He had done everything in his power to keep Karen away from him both at their first meeting and at the one today. It was only when he realized Karen wasn’t going anywhere without seeing William that he had finally given way. And he obviously had a strong hold over Will. No wonder Janey was suspicious of him.

  Karen did sleep. It was as if her mind had suddenly had enough and the fuse had blown. She fell into a dreamless slumber and didn’t wake till her phone went off. Looking blearily at the clock as she reached for the mobile, she saw it was six thirty in the morning, still pitch dark outside. The mobile number meant nothing to her, but she answered it nonetheless.

  “Karen?” William sp
oke in a low voice and she imagined Fisher within hearing distance.

  “Hi.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a hotel somewhere on the front. Can’t remember the name of it.”

  “So you stayed. I’m glad I caught you.”

  She waited.

  “Will you meet me before you go?”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t reply at once. “I need to tell you something.”

  His tone was emphatic.

  “Do I need to hear it?”

  “No, no, I suppose you don’t. It’s your choice. But I feel I owe you an explanation.”

  She hesitated. Maybe she should just run while she had the chance, jump in the car and begin the process of forgetting the man. But she knew herself too well. If she didn’t find out what he had to say, she would spend the next two years speculating and driving herself—and everyone else, for that matter—mad with it.

  “OK.”

  “If you tell me where you are, I can come to your hotel. They probably do breakfast.”

  Karen knew they did, because the girl at the desk had told her it would be later than usual, it being Boxing Day.

  “They don’t start serving till eight thirty.”

  “Well, shall I see you then?”

  “Alright. I’ll text you the name in a minute.”

  As she clicked off her phone and fell back on the pillow, she knew that part of her did not want to see William again. There was too much mess, too much pain, she was tired of it all. The other part, masochistic to the last, could barely contain herself.

  *

  William looked worn, as she herself must do. His dark tartan-pattern shirt was creased and buttoned up wrong, making one collar higher than the other. His hair was brushed but still windswept, his face pink from the cold morning air. And her heart went out to him, she couldn’t help it, seeing him sitting on one of the orange, foam-cushioned chairs in the hotel reception, just staring into space, waiting.

  They went through to the dining room, which was about half full, human noise subdued this morning, with just the overall chink of cutlery and china. A breakfast buffet was laid out on a long table against the far wall.